Apple seeds Mac OS X 10.3.5

Apple Computer, Inc. seeded developers Thursday evening with Mac OS X 10.3.5 Update, which weighs in just shy of 43 megabytes and carries build number 7M18. The system updater will reportedly deliver improvements to Audio and Sound, Bluetooth, Firewire, Graphics, OpenGL, Mail, Safari, and Networking.

According to Apple documentation, key enhancements to Mac OS X 10.3.5 include updated Mail and Image Capture applications, improved font management, ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers, additional FireWire and USB device compatibility, improved Bluetooth compatibility for Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse and Bluetooth phones, and improved compatibility for third party applications.

Sources said that Mac OS X 10.3.5 will bundle previous standalone security updates, while also including improved support for NTFS formatted volumes and improved reliability for user logins and mounting of home directories in a networked environment.

Mac OS X 10.3.5 surfaced in late June but was only provided to select Apple partners and AppleSeed members. During last week's Apple developers conference, several developers noticed that the company’s new liquid cooled 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5s were running early builds of Mac OS X 10.3.5.

Finally, Mac OS X 10.3.5 features improvements to Safari and Webkit frameworks, as Apple ties in revisions from the existing Safari 1.3 developer preview program.

Apple this week also told its “Select” Developer Connection members to expect the first seed of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” to appear on July 12th. The company typically seeds its AppleSeed and “Premier” Developer Connection members prior to seeding the much larger “Select” population.